HALLOWf-f-N T HE best childhood Robert knew anything about was his mother's. When his father or his nurse told him about their childhoods they were dull. His father had lived in New York, too, when he was a little boy and the only difference seemed to be that there had been more horses. His nurse had been a child in Ireland, and most of her stories seemed to be about how much better children had to behave then un- less they wanted to be punished. His mother had been a child in a place called Keene. In Keene there were great stretches of woods, dark and filled with secret life, rabbits and even deer; they were fairy deer, they had jewel eyes. When it was very cold- and in Keene it was colder than any- where when it was cold-and there was nothing to eat for the deer in the woods, they would come out early, ear- ly in the mornings, and steal out into the open behind the house, out by the chicken house, his mother said. The people would look out of the window, and out there, in the sharp white morn- ing, standing in the snow, there would be two deer, or perhaps three. And if anyone spoke loud, or if the window were thrown open, the deer would run like wild back to the woods, in a flash and a flurry of snow. In Keene there were long, stony roads and fields filled in summer with gold and purple flowering weeds, and the crickets sang in springtime, his moth- er said, like tiny sweet music. In the spring, early, you would open your window one night when you went to bed and suddenly, for the first time after the hard, silent vvinter, you would hear the first frogs in the swamp be- hind the house, singing in the still-frozen hollows. In Keene there was a road that ran past the house and up toward the woods, and that road was sown with dragon's teeth. The dragon had come down the road long ago switch- ing his tail, and the farmer from the next house had come out with his pitch- fork and defeated the dragon and he had switched back up the road spit- ting his teeth all over it, and ever since the road had been covered with white stones. In Keene strange, wonderful things happened that did not happen in N ew York; on Easter morning the sun danced in the sky for joy, and if you looked up, his mother said, you could see the sun dance. And on Christ- mas Eve there was a moment when all the fairy things, gnomes and pixies and fairies, came out and danced in the snow. I t was the only time in the year when they could dance, and at midnight the world turned over: Christ had been born and a new spirit filled the earth, bells rang in the steeples, and it was Christmas Day, and all the fairy things must go back into hiding once more. There was just that moment. Then it was Christmas, and the children walked through the snow in the morning with their arms piled up with packages for the neighbors. That was the child- hood he heard about from his mother. There was nothing like any of that about being a child in N ew York. R BERT lived in New York and went to a nursery school in the morn- ings. In the afternoons he went for walks in the Park with his nurse. He had friends that he met in the Park and sometimes they came to supper with him. His room was on the court side of the apartment, eight floors up above the courtyard, where men were always throwing pails of water around, making a loud splash, especially when Robert got up in the morning. It was rather dark in his room and when he played with his toys in there they had the light on. There were two big chests full of toys-trains and derricks and trucks that dumped things. He had more toys than almost any of the other boys. \Vhen he got in from walking every afternoon he played on the floor of his room. His supper was brought to him in there and he had his own special table and three child-size chairs. It was while he was being got ready for bed, usually, that his father and his moth- er got in, separately, his father from the of- fice, his mother from the Store. They always came in to say good night to him, and his father generally played with the games and trains for a while. \Vhen his mother came in she came in with a rush. She had dark hair and she was always different from the last time The part about hearing of his moth- er's childhood came after he had gone to bed. \Vhen he was a really little boy he used to call out for a drink of water, or to sit on the pot, while they were at dinner; the kitchen was beyond the dining room and his nurse couldn't hear him. His mother would come and take 1 7 him up, or get him the drink of water, and then she would sit on the edge of his bed in the dark and talk about when she was a little girl in Keene. Now that he was nearly seven, he called not because he couldn't get what he needed for himself but because he hoped to have stories there in the dark. Sometimes when his mother talked about being a little girl in Keene she made it sound exciting, but general- ly she made it sound strange and far- away and beautiful and sad. After she had kissed him good night and shut the door and there was nothing more to hear but the voices calling in the court- yard, Robert would lie still and think about Keene, the country he knew so well from a thousand little bits told on different nights. And even as the pic- ture of that place in his mind inseparably included fairies and monsters, so the little girl who was his mother lived there still. He saw the house, and the barn with a big green door for the horses to go in, and a door above in to the loft for the hay to be pitched through. He saw it in summer and in winter, and when he saw it in winter he saw it al- ways with the deer standing trembling down by the chicken house. I twas al] so real. The un true parts were as rea] as any. He saw the green-and-gold dragon, breathing fire, come switching down the road. The winds had great puffing mouths, like the picture of a wind in his poetry book, and the frogs sang. He thought about these things when he lay still in his bed at night in his room in New York. I N the mornings he got up and went about the day's business. One day he went to school and they were talk- ing about what was go- ing to happen in two days. I t was going to be Halloween. There was going to be a Hal- loween party at school and Miss Grant said they were all to bring their j ack-o' -Ian terns from home and they would dress up and play games. That morning she set them to drawing and coloring pumpkins, a row of them, graduating from big down to little. She said that pumpkins grew in the country in vegetable gardens. When school was finished for the day, Miss Grant told them all not to forget to ask their mothers to get them each a jack-o'-lantern for the par- ty. Robert remembered from last year ..